Abraham Baldwin Middle School  
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Abraham Baldwin

Abraham Baldwin was born in North Guilford on November 22, 1754. He was the son of Michael Baldwin, the Guilford blacksmith and an influential man in the community. When Baldwin was four years old, his mother died and he went to live with the Rose family on Wilbers Lane.

When he was fourteen, Baldwin entered Yale College and graduated at age eighteen. For the next three years, he studied for the ministry and was licensed in 1775. He then became a teacher at Yale, but resigned in 1779 to become a chaplain in the Revolutionary Army.

Baldwin studied law while serving in the Army and was admitted to the bar at the end of the war. He was still very interested in education and accepted an offer to set up a university in Georgia. Because the university developed slowly, Baldwin had time to serve as a member of the Georgia Legislature.

In 1787, Baldwin represented Georgia at the Federal Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. He was influential in achieving the Continental Compromise, which called for a federal legislature composed of a House of Representatives elected according to population and a Senate with an equal number of representatives from each state. He always regarded this as his greatest achievement; for without Baldwin’s vote, the convention would have been deadlocked and could well have failed to produce the constitution, as we know it.

At this time, Baldwin was working to establish the University of Georgia. He believed that a democratic government could be successful only if its citizens were well educated and that one of the responsibilities of a state was to support a strong educational system through the university level. He wrote the laws providing for the University of Georgia, which the legislature passed. These laws became the basis upon which our state university systems are modeled.

When the United States Constitution went into effect in 1789, Baldwin was elected to represent Georgia in the House of Representatives. He served for five terms until he was named to the Senate in 1799. After a short illness, he died on March 4, 1807 in his second term as a Senator, having served in the first nine congresses of the United States. His passing was a loss, not only for Georgians, but also for all Americans. When a new middle school was completed in North Guilford 1970, it was named for Abraham Baldwin, Guilford’s most illustrious native son.